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Abstract
In response to conflicting demands from society, the EU, and the global marketplace, the French and German economic elites are renegotiating the economic, political, and social relationships that provide the normative foundation of their institutional edifices. Because elites are constitutive of the systems in which they operate, I contend that exploring their capacity to adapt to the changing political economy provides insight into the capacity of their national institutional arrangements to adapt, as well. My comparative analysis—based on archival materials, case studies, interviews, and surveys—of French and German elites and their role in the liberalization process demonstrates that certain key aspects of nationally-specific models remain resilient, albeit under mounting and often contradictory internal and external pressures. Moreover, these French and German indications of resilience are not only distinct from the Anglo-American model but also from one another, debunking the notion of global convergence as well as an emergent European “third way.” While both sets of elites are experiencing change, the trends suggest distinct national sequencing and trajectories. In France, the elite who initially used their polyvalence, privilege, and position to resist liberalizing pressures have increasingly harnessed these assets in their management and manipulation of privatization, enabling more successful competition in the regional and global marketplaces. Importantly, this has been done without any substantive change in the French institutional arrangements. In the German case, elites—characterized by their expertise and experience—responded earlier and more proactively to similar political economic pressures. However, their consensus-based, long-run oriented approach has had marginally diminishing returns as the rigidities of the German institutional infrastructure assert themselves, exacerbating existing tensions. These tendencies are unlikely to weaken as deregulation continues, fueling the broader liberalization trend as well as the nascent public debate already manifest in the French case. In both cases, further adjustment will not have the same degree of support from these traditionally strong States, which are increasingly constrained by domestic and EU budgets and skeptical publics. These constraints and opportunities combine to test the efficiency and effectiveness of even the brightest elites and the best configuration of capitalism.
